Thanks for all the tips. I finally had enough of insisting on older driver versions. Windows automatically updated my driver to 311 and I had to uninstall it every time I switched on. In the end I found out that the fault was mine. Sometimes the application tried to update a uniform that did not exist for the shader currently selected. Previous driver versions tolerated this, >=310.xx do not. It was much more difficult to find than to fix, so thankfully it is alright now. Thanks once again.

Thanks for all the tips. I finally had enough of insisting on older driver versions. Windows automatically updated my driver to 311 and I had to uninstall it every time I switched on. In the end I found out that the fault was mine. Sometimes the application tried to update a uniform that did not exist for the shader currently selected. Previous driver versions tolerated this, >=310.xx do not. It was much more difficult to find than to fix, so thankfully it is alright now. Thanks once again.

If location is a value other than
-1 and it does not represent a valid uniform variable location
in the current program object, an error will be generated, and
no changes will be made to the uniform variable storage of the
current program object. If location is
equal to -1, the data passed in will be silently ignored and the
specified uniform variable will not be changed.

Windows automatically updated my driver to 311 and I had to uninstall it every time I switched on.

Ehm, yeah ... O_O

Or, you could switch to manual updates (i.e. be notified but install yourself) and just don't give a damn about what Windows tells you (don't know about Win8 though). You can also hide the update so it won't show up.

It's still something you can't tell customers to do. Customers hate being told to do this kind of thing - they may have their own requirements to have automatic updates enabled, and now your program has just conflicted with those requirements. So you've potentially lost a sale. Telling customers to switch off automatic updates is an overly-simplistic non-solution.